Posts by Bluenose

Think how much better it would be if.....

The following was not so very true

"....blamed a culture of secrecy for protecting civil servants who signed deals they did not understand"

Says it all. Poor old civil servants being asked to read documents that they don't understand and agree to them. Says far more about the quality of the Govt's procurement organisation than the allegations about the suppliers that are made.

Perhaps if the Govt invested in the people that work for it by paying them better salaries (at least commensurate with those paid to people in the same role in the private sector) and giving them the write training e.g. IACCM instead of Procurement they might stand a chance of understanding the contracts.

If he is right...

then most women seek a body that has not means of reproduction (unless they do a fully functional Barbie or is that just those funny shops with dark windows in Soho??) seems incredible to me.

As to the rest of his statements, considering the number of dodgy looking women on all those morning tv shows (dad doesn't believe he fathered my empteenth child) I think he is barking. Consider the number of children that Paris has (0 unless you count the dog(s)) versus my wife (who is attractive to me but may not meet the great doctor's demands for the perfect woman) with 2 kids and his theory starts to fall apart.

Me thinks that not being a real genius the good doc is simply trying to get laid by some attractive long legged and well stacked blonde student (with no reproductive parts).

Based on past experience

NASA has found that space can support undeveloped intelligence and on that basis Paris has been selected to go to Mars together with the Obama's puppy dog (probably not a puppy now but hey who cares).

Humour is dead.....

Did I ever tell you the one about the one legged man and the donkey.... after today's decision I don't think I will. Looks like New Labour's attempt to destroy our ability to smile has succeeded

With regards to the Brigitte Nielsen measurement

When you say heels is that 6 inch or 2 inch heels or some other height that you failed mention? Are platforms involved?

Pots and Kettles

Why is the request from Serco to their key suppliers to cut their charges so different from what the Govt. has done to Serco and only a fool (Francis Maude??) would think that Serco wouldn't look to get some financial support from their major suppliers following Serco's agreement to cut its charges to the Govt.

If you ask me this is just a the current Govt realing that their big suppliers have costs to and that the big suppliers will try to maintain margins by cutting costs in the same way as Francie Maude. I think this is something called Captalism and the Free Market something Francis and his friends are supposed to know about and support!!

Aliens because I think all politicians are!

Celebrity rules

yet another w****r gets their 15 minutes of fame. As soon as pleaded guilty he should have been foced to wear a sign in the street saying "I am a t****r". Would be cheaper than prison and less likely to encourage him to continue his behaviour when he gets out.

Maybe Dave....

knows more about Mr Putin's intentions for the rebuilding of a greater Russia than the rest of us. Then again as a former consultant he probably went a sold Mr Putin the idea of building a greater Russia after discussing with all the old Communists what was wrong with the current one.

Consultants and lawyers should be banned from being PM as should trade union shop stewards instead we should have people who have actually had to work really hard for a living to get to be PM. Unfortunately there are not that many of them in the old House of Commons these days.

Paris 'cos she'd make a good Tory MP.

Don't ya love politics and personal agendas

For an alternative take on the research try the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11480916) they state that the sun had little to do with the warming and that the evidence does not detract from the impact "fact" that human activiy has had the greatest impact. Oh and don't read to much into the results.

This article and the BBC show why climate science and those in favour of and against the human factor or even whether there is or isn't climate change are so discredited. How can two such variant views ever be reconciled reasonably to determine the truth. But then again there is never one truth.

40,000 extra

It is important to bear in mind that these are "extra" and add to the existing number so I have some simple questions:

How do you get them into the country? South Africa was a nightmare travelwise with expensive flights and the issues of actually landing them :)

Where do you keep them, is there a sudden upsurge in demands for commercial buildings (as the hotels are normally all booked out)? If so please let me know so I can invest in a commercial property portfolio.

How do you feed them? 40K additional people eat an awful lot of food. Do the police look for an increase in the number of Tesco equivalent home delivery lorries?

I think these so called advocacy groups (and Boris Johnson) are typical of their ilk (which included politicians) in that they come up with these number but fail to apply real world scenarios to them to determine whether the number is reasonable or not. To infiltrate 40K women in to any country would need massive resources and time to achieve. On that basis I would suggest that Boris send out his spies to keep watch on the grocery home delivery lorries now as the criminals will already by bringing these people in now (not sure what they are going to do for the next 2 years though).

Paris because she could not even infiltrate Japan and she is not a sex worker.

Not sure what difference it will make....

as an existing TalkTalk customer, I already find that the throughput on my existing broadband link is pathetic in the evening. Wife and I tried to watch Spooks on the iPlayer the other night, 1 hour 20 minutes to watch an hour long episode.

This new idea just means faster tails attached to very slow dogs.

Where's Bruce Willis.....

Am I living my life through a surrogate??? They had people working for the police who did this type of thing in that movie. Think I'll move to a cctv free reservation like the surrogate free ones in the movie.

Don't panic.....

the Pope has arrived and is on his way

I was once a townie...

but now class my self as a country bumpking having lived in this hereby village for over 10 years and the reality is that it is not planning permission that creates problems for phone masts, broadband providers and other such very useful tools that can benefit us yokels, it is business cases and economics.

There is a small town just over a mile away from our village which has great broadband speeds (up to 8MB and they really mean more than 3MB). Meanwhile I suffer from an 800kbps throughput on an up to 8MB connection. My provider is not interested in LLU for only 350 houses and 75 businesses and nor are BT or anyone else. The same is true of the mobile phone companies, they have the M1 (about 3 miles away) covered and our little village is not really of much interest, so much thanx to Vodafone who do have a local mast which gives a great signal but boo to all the others who don't.

So thanks the libcons who have scuppered my chances of getting decent broadband by insisting that I pay full price for a broadband service that will never give me 4MB and will struggle to deliver 2MB on a consistent basis (and I can always deam of getting 24MB or move back to town) by getting rid of the broadband tax. My best hope is to get the local parish council to support an approach to Rutland Telecom or similar to see if they can help and I am sure when it comes to planning permission no one in the village will give a twopenny f whether the cabinets are big and green or big and brown.

"Execs who use above-average amounts of expletives are also more likely to be crooked, they said"

I can think of quite a few people and some on TV who must be wondering what their auditors will be looking for this Christmas

Free Speech, now Paid Speech....

would probably be allowed. Wonder if you have to pay to fill in the 3rd party form?

It is also interesting to note that if someone shouted out support the Patriots (an American football team worshipped by some Americans :) ) they would also have to fill in a form so the issue here appears to be that any form of communication that does not revolve around, "get in to American Eagle there's 50% off or other such commercial speak) is banned by this company. Now that is a step to far.

Imagine standing outside the Houses of Parliament and only being able to talk about politics or going to work and only being allowed to discuss work. Where would our discussions of the weather, football, the opposite sex, etc be held. Pubs could ban us discussing such things and force us only talk about the quality (or more likely lack of it) of their beers and wines.

I think therefore that I stand in support of this bloke who like most scientists was simply propounding standing in support of his own unproven theorie relating to the origins and laws of this universe and possibly others. Wonder if Richard Dawkins has managed to prove his theory of the genetic meme yet??

To summarise.....

I think everyone here agrees that

a)ICT in schools is actually focussed on teaching people to use Microsoft 'cos that's what they will need to use when they go to work (should they find a job) or write their university thesis.

b) just because you enjoy using something does not mean you need to know how it works or how to programme it (I have no idea how you build a car other then it involves robots and screws)

c)The old adage, "those who can do those who can't teach", appears to apply in repect of schools ICT provision. Those with the skills can earn more doing something other than trying to teach a gand of kids who don't want to know.

Rumour has it...

Dave is thinking of using Sadville as the best way to fix Parliament. MPs can all log in as their avatars to attend debates (John Redwood can use Spock as his). This will get rid of the expenses problems as MPs can all live in their constituency houses and not have to worry about whether they can claim for the duck house.

I'm sure some enterprising entrepreneur can sell the Govt their one Sadville houses where they can live so they won't even need a constituency house.

Mailshot designed to stop the opt out

I received the letter and the nice information about how to get the relevant form to opt out of this insecure and not very reassuring mess of a project. In the envelope was another document to allow me to order the form/letter in another language. Surely it was not beyond the wit of the people sending the letter to send me the opt out form as well.

This mailshot was designed to stop people opting out by making it necessary for them to jump through the unnecessary hurdles to do so. Surely a fairer and more appropriate approach would have been to include the opt out form (so people could make an easy choice) and give people the web address to download foregin language versions of the documents.

Let's be clear here

A lot of Govt IT people are still having problems understanding the difference between Open Source and Open Standards, so expecting them to make credible decisions means they have to be educated first. The problem is that in the time to educate them there is a need for a buying decision and no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft (not that I am aware of anyway).

If they actually got to the point of buying Open Source products then there are the issues of security but first and foremost there is the issue of support. If the Govt buys Open Office who will support it, write the patches to remove any security issues, write the code to improve it and add functionality? And how many of these people are not UK citizens? This is the single biggest barrier to using Open Source. Whilst most of us are happy to use Open Office to write letters to our grannies or send personalised newsletters to our friends how many would seriously set about writing the low level strategy to defend the UK in case of a dirty bomb imported via Dover? The Government won't do this because it had no control over the code that has been written nor the people writing that code. For all the Government knows there may be hidden somewhere in the code a trigger to send a copy of the document to a nice server in China or India. At least MS Office is written by a company who the American Govt has some control over and who has employees that can be subject to security checks when they are employed. Who does that on Open Source projects?

The big "failures" that people mention on this site normally have nothing to do with the software. Based on experience I am not even sure that they are the fault of the people employed to deliver the solution. In most instances it is because the customer does not understand that a change to scope equals, a change to the price, an increase in effort, an increase in duration and if not managed correctly a break in the delivery process. These issues have nothing to do with the Govt or politiicans it is down to the weaknesses in the staff that the Civil Service employs.

Whereas in days gone by people with a strong public service ethic have worked in the public sector today to many people work there who have a strong personal or politicial agenda which carries them off at tangents to the work of that they are supposed to do. Left leaning union members believe that the private sector is there to rip them off because they do not understand the value of reputation nor the damage that can be done to a reputation through a deliberate policy of ripping customers off. Of course their view of private companies is not exactly contrary to some of the views expressed here.

Finally, having had experience of trying to implement Open Source products in major government projects can anyone tell me how I find the resources to do it? If we use Microsoft or Oracle we can call on a resource pool of thousands between in house resource and the contractor market within the UK. If we use MySQL or any other open source database/middleware product, how many people are there speciailised in these products in the UK contractor market with the necessary security clearances 'cos we don't have that many in house speciailsts.